 Welcome to this edition of Abel Denonera, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the definitely able. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. Arlene is off today. On this special edition, part one of this special edition of Abel Denonera, we focus on the Disability Awareness Day in which we covered it at the State House, which includes central Vermont. On this first episode, we focus on a workshop that was taped called the Human Cost of Cuts with Susan Aronoff and the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council. They take a look at the impact of budget decreases on social determinants of health, the cost of cuts on Abel Denonera. I work for the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council and my organization believes a lot in accessibility, making things accessible. And one of the things we've been learning about is using the mic. We call it liking the mic. So I'm learning to like the mic, and I'm going to try very hard to make sure you all can hear me. So how do you feel about the door being open? Show of hands to keep the doors open? Show of hands to close the door? Okay, if someone near each door closed the door, that would be great. So welcome to Disability Awareness Day. Before we get started, I would love it if you'd be willing, if you could go around the room, and if you could just say your name and your town. I think one of the most amazing things about this day is that we've got people here from Derby Lines and we've got people here from Brattle Park. So I think the organizers of this event worked really hard to get people out from all over the state, and I would love for you all to hear where you're all from. So we can start in that back corner. If you could just say your name and your town. Thank you. Oh right, I'm feeling it in the house. Yeah. Back corner. My name is Gennie, I'm from, uh, Boston. Boston! Woo! This is a back row. This one, what do you have from Burlington? Burlington, great. Patricia Woodbury? Woodbury, awesome. Burlington. This is Mark from Brattle World. Brattle World. Just so you guys know, it takes like two hours to get here from Brattle World. These books had to be pretty counted earlier. Danielle, where are you from? Underhill, awesome. Brattle World. Awesome. Joe Brattle World. Brattle World. Underhill. I'm from St. Alvin's, my name's Pianca Lake. St. Alvin's, that's almost as far as Brattle World. Good for you for getting down here. Great. Who's next? You'll call him Woodbury from 71. He's here, that's Burlington. That's Burlington, welcome. Del Obsky from West Berkshire. Where's that? That's up on the Kennedy Border North of Beansburg. Oh, okay. You might be in the running for the furthest way. Welcome, thanks for being here. All right, how about if we start in that back corner over there? Castleton, great. Who else? Castleton. Who else? Burlington, awesome. Great, welcome. Excellent. I'm from Harvard. Harvard, welcome. My name is St. Alvin and I live in St. Alvin. Excellent. That'd be too few while to get up here, too. Thanks for coming. Welcome. Great. Welcome. From where? Great. Great, I know where that is. Out here, Wells River. How long did it take you to get here? More than an hour? Well, thanks for coming. Okay, very. Front row, welcome. Welcome. Awesome. What is the, awesome. Another far traveler. Thank you. Okay, how about if we swing over there? Thank you for being here. Welcome. Cool. Thank you. Hey, Thomas, good to see you. Welcome to call. Should we continue with the back wall here, the center section? Awesome. Awesome. Theory. Who town boy? Right next door. Welcome. Welcome to the town from Marshfield. Marshfield, welcome. Contest, you're welcome. Is that this middle row here? Right here. Please come here. Right here. Will, thank you. Welcome. Christine, we're here. Jerry. Robin, from Brown, we're out here. We're out here from Puckett. Okay, awesome. Welcome. Welcome. Glad you made it. Welcome. Wow, another far traveler. Welcome. You're here. Jerry, darling, from Berry. Welcome. Kevin, from Burlington. Larry, from Montpelio. Middlebury. Welcome. Welcome. David, from Storiema, because it's moving and elsewhere, it's just the white fabric. And that's excellent. I'm going to be. Welcome. Thank you, sir. Great. Glad to meet you. And, Sado, thanks everyone for being here. Can I get a quick show of hands? Oh, hey! Oh, my God! Please, there's more! Okay, show me here. Bear from Hartwick. Hartwick, welcome. Bear from Hartwick. That means it. Patrick from Hartwick. Marshmill? Welcome. Thank you for coming on us. Thank you. Can I get a show of hands for folks that this is your first time being in the Vermont State House? First time? Oh, I got a pretty extreme crew on here. All right. For the first timers, and even for some of you who've been here before, I think one of the most important things that goes on in this building is called the state budget. The budget is what we're going to be talking about for the rest of the workshop. The budget is when the people that we elect are senators and are representatives. Decide how much of the money that they collect from taxes and fees and other things. Decide how much of that money they're going to spend on roads and how much of that money they're going to spend on police and how much of that money they're going to spend on certain services, sometimes called human services, social services. So we're going to be talking about the health and human services budget and some tasks that are being proposed to that budget. And rather than just talk about numbers and millions of dollars a year and 42 people there, things like that, I kind of wanted to hear from all of you guys who traveled all these hours to get here today. What's the impact of budget cuts, of cuts and services? How that impacts your life and your health? Because one of the things we want the people we elect to understand is that even if they don't cut healthcare by cutting something like housing or food or something else, they might impact healthcare. So I wanted to just kind of talk about a couple of the budget cuts and get some feedback from all of you guys about how those budget cuts will impact actual people. People like you, people like your friends, people like your family, people who vote for these elected representatives. So I think if we can start telling the story of if you cut personal care and attention to services and someone can't get to work, this is how it's going to impact their day and their life and their children and their families. So right now there are a lot of groups and organizations here today that can give you specific information, the facts and figures about things that are being cut. Then there's some fact sheets on that table over there. And my organization has a table out in the hall with some criticism figures. I don't want to take up our time together talking about a lot of numbers. I want to talk about your actual lives, what matters and what appears. So if I were to say to you that people who are getting developmental services waivers for things like respite and employment support, if I were to say those things were being cut, could you give me some examples of how it might impact someone's life? We're going to look at them. Okay, so I don't know your name but you've got a great purple sweatshirt on. Can you give an example of community support during the week? Like I had someone give another example. I don't know your name, Marjorie. I don't even know. I want to throw that on. I'll take the brand. Okay. Marjorie's example, I'm sorry, I didn't give your example first. The first example was that someone who was receiving community support wouldn't be able to get to activities outside of her house without that community support and those activities including like therapeutic horseback riding. And the other example from Marjorie was that without personal security income she wouldn't be able to pay her rent. Are there other examples? I wouldn't have the support with my wife or CIS, I work with somebody and without her I wouldn't have the support. And how would you like my job? For your job. So you need support in order to work. And has it been important to you to work? How about hearing? Help me to understand about reasons to know. Understand about some of the things that people take for granted. We think it's very hard. We understand it helps me to become a better person. That's pretty clear about reasons to know. And I think if we could not have somebody's services it would probably cause it to be important. But it is right now to keep her house better. That's one thing that people have found is that when countries spend more on social services things like housing, job support, they end up spending less on healthcare because when people have good housing and they have good food and they have good schools, they tend to have better health. We as a country, we spend a lot more on healthcare and less on the social support. Other countries that spend more on social support end up spending less on healthcare. Because to Gary's point, a lot of these things like working can help people with being seen and helped. The tenement in this hand up is the front row. Right there, right next to the light, pull up. Your cost of your medicine would go up without the benefits that you receive. That is huge. Thank you. The gentleman in the second row. Eric. I also use SSI. Without SSI I wouldn't have the support that I need to get to which one's on. So you get assistance with transportation. Transportation is really important and in a state like Vermont they call states like Vermont rural states. A lot of land in between the towns. Transportation is a big challenge. People who live with disabilities in rural states have greater issues with social isolation. It's just harder to get around. You're in the car and you're more socially isolated. Another, in the back row. Hi, I'm Julia. It's a week in Montana. I've spent an hour talking to children in your room with a lot of problems in their rooms. One of them is too weak in the house. Great. In the back corner. I'm Nicole. For me, I get a support to SSIA, which is transportation. Okay. And then I get a support to a land name and transportation. So this is Nicole. She gets assistance with transportation. I'm about to ask her how her life would be different without that transportation. It's difficult for me to get around, but you all still have, like, power and other things in your course. But that way, I feel that I get confused with directions and with the bus. So if I do that, that way I won't get to do the VC and I am able to still get around where I need to go. Okay. So Nicole was talking about being able to get some transportation assistance from Howard, which one of the other things I want to mention in the time that we have together, is Howard is a type of agency. It's called a designated agency. How many of you have heard of designated agencies, DAs, and specialized services agencies, SSAs? So I can quote some of her DAs and SSAs. So the designated agencies and the specialized services agencies receive a lot of public money, Medicaid money, public money to provide services on behalf of the state and see money from the state to provide services to people with a wide range of disabilities who need a wide range of needs. And one of the things that the Developmental Disabilities Council has worked on really hard last year in the budget and this year in the budget is trying to make sure that the people who work for the designated agencies, the people who work for Howard, who work for the United Counseling, who work for Washington County Mineral that these people who do the work that keep people independent and in the community and happy and healthy and working, it's really important that these people have a living wage, a livable wage. And so last year in the budget process the legislature put money in the budget so that the direct care workers at the designated agencies and the specialized service agencies could have a wage of $14. Now it's supposed to be phase one. Everyone called it phase one because this year it was supposed to be phase two where there was supposed to be money in the budget so that that minimum wage could go up to $15, but also so that other workers in the designated agencies and the specialized services agencies could get more of a living wage, more equal to what other state employees get paid doing similar work or what people get paid doing similar work in hospitals or other organizations. Because right now there's a staff turnover rate of about... I said I was going to talk about another show of apologies. Of about 25%, that means one in four, one in four workers at the designated agency or specialized service agency has to get replaced each year. And aside from that being very disruptive to the people that they serve, it's also really expensive to the organization. It costs a lot of money. But the reason why they have this high turnover rate is that they cannot pay enough to keep good people on staff long term to do this really important work. So one of the things that we've been talking about with the budget committees and that I told you guys to talk about with your senator and other representatives is the need to implement phase two of the wage increases for the designated agency and the specialized services agency. We have a lot of fact sheets about technical issues of things like wage compression and those turnover rates, all kinds of information. One information to give your senator a rep, we've got it. If you just want to tell them I need these services, my friends need these services, these services to tend on a well paid, qualified workforce, and stabilize that workforce. That's enough to help them. So that's a real big issue and I wanted to make sure since a couple of you have mentioned workers from designated agencies being the ones who provide you the support and provide you the services, a lot of you probably got here today with support from the services, from the staff, from the designated agencies and the specialized workforce agencies. So that was something like big words, specialized services agencies. You can just call them DA's and SSAs and everyone in possibility will know exactly what you're talking about. Along those same lines, if you take some time today to talk to one of your senators or rep and really encourage you to do that and I'll be around. I can help make introductions. Other people will be around. We can help make introductions. If you talk to them, please talk to them about cuts to a lot of the human services programs. There's a cut to a personal attendant services program that will affect 42 people who rely on personal attendant care and we can get you the facts on that. There are cuts to people who received developmental services on waivers. Those waivers are going to be cut across the board by about $4 million which is a cut that affects a real table, a real respite or a real service that people depend on. It really impacts quality of life. So please, it's great you traveled here. You came on the way here from Dermaline where you might be and you're both from Bravo and Patney. Take advantage of the fact that you're in the building. Seek out a senator or rep. Ask us how and say please fund those salary increases. Please stabilize the services. Please don't cut services. Please protect our Medicaid. We can spend another hour from people sharing stories about what it means to them to have transportation, to have housing, to have food and how it would impact all of us if they did and how it would impact health and costs. There's someone over here who said smartly how it would be so scary that if you paid for these services you end up having to pay less for emergency services and less for more expensive healthcare down the road. So while you're here while you're here please reach out talk to a rep, talk to a senator and express your views and make your voice heard. Well that puts an end to this part one edition of the Disability Awareness Day special presentation of Abled and on Air The Human Costs of Cuts. On the next episode we will focus on the House. How do you talk to your legislator? All that and much more on the next edition of Abled and on Air. Stay tuned. I'm Lauren Simon.